Jesse Berlin, Thomas C. Chalmers – 1 May 1988 – This paper examines eight published reviews each reporting results from several related trials. Each review pools the results from the relevant trials in order to evaluate the efficacy of a certain treatment for a specified medical condition. These reviews lack consistent assessment of homogeneity of treatment effect before pooling. We discuss a random effects approach to combining evidence from a series of experiments comparing two treatments.

Claudio Tiribelli, Stefano Bellentani – 1 May 1988 – Transient stimulation of target tissues by sex steriods can cause long‐lasting changes that may facilitate or alter responses to subsequent hormonal treatment. How these altered characteristics are propagated during cell division in the absence of the stimulating hormone is unknown. The human hepatocarcinoma cell line HepG2 was used as a model to examine the effects of estrogen on the synthesis of serum apolipoproteins in vitro.

Lewis L. Levy – 1 May 1988 – Brain computerized axial tomography scans were performed in 18 consecutive liver cirrhosis patients with chronic persistent encephalopathy (8 alcoholic and 10 nonalcoholic) in order to evaluate the incidence of brain atrophy in this pathological condition. Fifteen patients of similar age with liver cirrhosis of Child's class B but with acute episodic hepatic encephalopathy were studied in parallel.

Amos Lanir, Roger L. Jenkins, Cary Caldwell, Robert G. L. Lee, Urmila Khettry, Melvin E. Clouse – 1 May 1988 – The hypothesis was tested that human donor livers with higher ATP content and energy charge achieve better results after hepatic transplantation. Biopsies were obtained from 25 donor livers immediately prior to implantation and analyzed for adenine nucleotides using high‐performance liquid chromatography. The results were correlated with organ histology, transplant function and outcome. Significantly higher concentrations of ATP (4.22 ± 2.87 vs.

Yuji Yoshikawa, Yoichi Sakata, Gotaro Toda, Hiroshi Oka – 1 May 1988 – Protein C, one of the vitamin K‐dependent plasma proteins synthesized in the liver, was measured immunologically in normal subjects (n = 20), patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (n = 60), liver cirrhosis (n = 60), acute hepatitis (n = 16), chronic hepatitis (n = 19), malignant neoplasms other than hepatocellular carcinoma (n = 35) and patients on warfarin treatment (n = 20).

Dale A. Parks, D. Neil Granger – 1 May 1988

Horace A. Laffaye – 1 May 1988

Howard M. Shulman, Pankaj Sharma, Deborah Amos, L. Frederick Fenster, George B. McDonald – 1 May 1988 – We tested the hypothesis that liver histology from patients with graft‐versus‐host disease could be distinguished from other common liver diseases. Liver biopsies from 33 allogeneic marrow transplant recipients with acute and chronic graft‐versus‐host disease and 37 nontransplant liver disease patients without graft‐versus‐host disease were recut, restained and coded for blind review.

Yoshinori Katsuma, Normand Marceau, Masaharu Ohta, Samuel W. French – 1 May 1988 – A new method of visualizing the three‐dimensional architecture of the cytokeratin filaments of the intact rat hepatocyte in situ has been achieved. Frozen sections of liver cut 10 μm thick were serially extracted to remove all elements of the cells except the intermediate filaments. Parallel sections were stained with monoclonal antibodies to the two main cytokeratins found in bile duct and liver cells.

Jay W. Marks – 1 May 1988 – The goal of this study was to identify the structural and compositional features of human gallstones that influence in vitro gallstone dissolution in the cholesterol solvent monooctanoin. Gallstones were obtained from 86 consecutive patients who had at least three morphologically similar stones. One stone from each patient was dissolved in ethanol/ether to determine cholesterol and matrix composition. The remaining two matched stones were dissolved in either monoctanoin plus ethanol (n = 86) or monooctanoin plus 2‐mercaptoethanol (n = 86).